Talk:Prilep-Bitola dialect

Persistent reverts by User:JSimin
That addition of "some linguists ... Bulgarian diasystem" doesn't belong here. It is not a statement about the topic of this article at all. Unlike in the case of some of the transitional dialects further east, this opinion is in no way related to actual dialect geography. Nobody who would consider Prilep/Bitola speech as Bulgarian would do so specifically and individually with respect to this dialect (as opposed to others); whoever holds such views does so because he considers Macedonian as a whole a part of Bulgarian. That such ideas exist is a (marginal) topic for Macedonian language, and treated fully in Political views on the Macedonian language or elsewhere. Taking it into every detail article dealing with parts and aspects of Macedonian is nonsensical.

And even apart from that, it is so fringy (in today's international scholarship) that a mentioning in the lead, even if just in a short neutral statement, is undue weight.

Plus, the sourcing is misleading. You can't quote a 1928 source for a statement presented in the present tense, on an issue where we all know that perceptions have crucially changed in between. Fut.Perf. ☼ 00:27, 1 September 2008 (UTC)


 * I would like to specify:


 * 1) These persistent reverts are not only mine. Everybody can see that this sentence about the other POVs was first added by GrigorG, then was erased persistently by Balkanfever (who violated the 3RR). Laveol and Future Perfect at Sunrise took part too.
 * 2) I don't understand why Fut.Perf. claims that this opinion "is in no way related to actual dialect geography". Do you red the sources? You can pay attention at least to the book of the prominent dialectologist S. Stoykov (because it is online too). He don't discuss only the general questions, he describes these dialects (specifically and individually) as a part of the Bulgarian diasystem. Therefore we can't turn this information only to articles as Political views on the Macedonian language, because I pointed scientific, not political sources about these dialects.
 * 3) The source from 1929 (not 1928) has its weight along with the other sources. It shows that this opinion isn't some new political theory without relevant scientific context. I hope that the editor with impressive knowledge as Future Perfect at Sunrise realizes the difference between some new, modern sciences and the old sceinces as are the different part of linguistics, where the achievements from the first half of XX century (and even earlier) are basic. In order to concrete, I’ll point that the biggest part of dialectological material of these dialects were collected and published in ХІХ and in the first half of XX century mostly by authors who thought that they made a contribution to Bulgarian dialectology. :)
 * 4) The opinion about Bulgarian character of these dialects is the other opinion. As I know, there are only two scientific POV about this matter. It is truth that there was a time when was a third opinion, but unlike in the case of BG appurtenance it was very hesitatingly grounded by some Serbian authors  and isn't in a currency.
 * 5) The argument about undue weight can be in the favour of the thesis about the necessity to mention the other POV. Since as  “NPOV says that the article should fairly represent all significant viewpoints that have been published by a reliable source, and should do so in proportion to the prominence of each” In this case we only mention that there are such opinion.  As I understood Fut.Perf  accepted that this POV was dominant in the past. This reason itself makes the POV significant in diachronic plan. Exept this, important is the circumstance that this POV is shared today.
 * I understand that everybody in this argue has his opinion and maybe datreminative is his attitude to the Macedonian question as a whole. However I appeal to try to present honest the concrete subject and to be be loyal to the NPOV.--JSimin (talk) 00:52, 2 September 2008 (UTC)


 * You have absolutely no concept of undue weight. The "scientific" idea that Macedonian is Bulgarian has an entire article devoted to it. It does not need to be mentioned in this specific article. The only reason it was put here is to further a fringe view.  Balkan Fever not a fan? say so! 00:57, 14 September 2008 (UTC)


 * It is very easy to declare that somebody hasn't concept of something. There are arguments from the one side and only conclusion as an answer by BalkanFever. Maybe he is right, but I can see it because he didn't explain his POV. The only argument - that there is an entire article about BG position about the language in RoM, for me isn't serious reason to erase the disputable sentence, at least because the quoted authors not only Bulgarian linguists. Except this, more important is that the object in this article is the concrete dialect spoken in Republic of Macedonia and parts from Greece. If there are other POVs about these concrete group of dialects why he can't point them? If this POVs deserve to be mention in the article Macedonain language, if there are entire article devoted to the this POV about the standard language, why we can’t even mention in the article about one of the dialects with relevant sources? I saw that there are many comments in the summaries with political connotation. Maybe the real reason about the reluctance of the presence of the other scientific POV is political?--GrigorG (talk) 01:39, 14 September 2008 (UTC)


 * There are points of view on the entire Macedonian language, there are points of view on the dialects of Macedonia as a whole, but not on the individual dialects (except when looking at some of them as transitional). Therefore, the passage has no place here. And funny how you insinuate that I'm removing it for political reasons, when that's exactly why you added it.  Balkan Fever  01:52, 14 September 2008 (UTC)


 * How can you assert that there aren't POVs on the individual dialects? The concrete example refute it. There is other POV about this group and therefore the passage (sentence) has its place.
 * P.S.The "insinuate" about political reasons didn't relate to you personally. I talk over those who shows political connotation in the summaries (as I note). Accidentally or not, their POV coincide with yours, but I discussed "the reluctance of the presence of the other scientific POV" as a whole. About your personal reasons I can't utter at this stage of conversation.--GrigorG (talk) 02:14, 14 September 2008 (UTC)


 * What "concrete example"? The only people that consider this dialect Bulgarian are the ones that consider the entire Macedonian language Bulgarian. That is why it's not specifically notable or relevant.  Balkan Fever  02:36, 14 September 2008 (UTC)


 * I wrote that the "concrete example" refute the assertion that there aren't other POV about these concrete dialects ("...not on the individual dialects...").
 * If there are authors who consider this concrete group of dialects Bulgarian, we have to note this fact in the article. The fact that these authors in the other places consider the language in RoM Bulgarian as a whole don't change the situation. I would agree with you if we talk only about authors who don't discuss the concrete dialects. However, in this case we have dialectological opinions about the group which is the object of the article.
 * Of course, I can say nothing against the eventual idea to explain in the article (in the text or in the footnote) that these authors associate all Slavic dialects in MK with Bulgarian diasystem.--GrigorG (talk) 03:13, 14 September 2008 (UTC)


 * I'm really having trouble following your arguments here... What is your point? And what is a concrete dialect meant to be?  Balkan Fever  04:48, 14 September 2008 (UTC)
 * I thought that I phrased clear, but obviuosly there is a problem. The logic is simple - "If there are authors who consider this concrete group of dialects Bulgarian, we have to note this fact in the article". I am talking about linguists and about the scientific POV which was dominant in the times when these dialects were represented and described in the science. If we accept the argument against it - that the deleted other scientific POV is a “fringe theory”, we have to delete this kind of information from many other articles and thus to make a seriuos step against NPOV.
 * I don’t understand “what is a concrete dialect meant to be?”. Here we discuss the right of the other scientific POV about the dialect to be represented – even with one sentence.--GrigorG (talk) 09:53, 14 September 2008 (UTC)


 * It's hard to phrase things properly if you don't know any English. The information about Bulgarian authors is noted in the relevant articles. It is not relevant here, and therefore doesn't need to be noted.  Balkan Fever  10:35, 14 September 2008 (UTC)


 * O, don't be bashful - if you don't understand something due to linguistical reasons (my "any English"), please, ask me! In essence: I would like to note that this is not information only about BG authors, this is an information about other POV which is shared mostly by BG linguists. This standpoint concerns the dialects from the region around Prilep and Bitola and therefore is quite relevant in the article about dialects Prilep and Bitola.--GrigorG (talk) 10:59, 14 September 2008 (UTC)


 * You guys need to calm down a notch. Stop insulting each other and try to have a productive debate. Also, if you keep going back and forth on the article page, it will be protected from editing. If someone makes an edit, just come tell me or another administrator the situation and we'll act on it; please do not edit war. If anyone has questions or concerns, my talk page is open. Cheers, Master of Puppets  Call me MoP! :)  22:11, 21 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Sorry, but it's not my fault they don't understand what undue weight and fringe theories are. None of Future Perfect's objections have been met, and he is an actual linguist. The only reason the passage is being placed in the article, by Bulgarians, is to further the (fringe, nationalist) idea that Macedonian is Bulgarian. I don't like edit-warring, but what can I possibly do with these nationalist tag-team meatpuppets?  Balkan Fever  23:45, 21 September 2008 (UTC)


 * BalkanFever, I treat with respect you and Future Perfect, but your qualifications aren't enough argument for erasing the other scientific POV. Labels like "nationalist" can't help us to resolve the problem. I hope you understand that I can find some nationalistic reasons for your demand to delete any mentioning other POV and to define every other POV as quite "fringe". It is senseless. I propose to find together some issue. Are you agree?--JSimin (talk) 00:06, 23 September 2008 (UTC)


 * JSimin, if you seriously want some constructive debate, please first ask yourself and then answer me this: do you believe you understand the argument I made in my initial posting? Because I have the feeling you do not. We can only meaningfully discuss if we can be sure we all grasp what the other side is saying. In this case, to me it feels like BalkanFever and me talking against walls. Fut.Perf. ☼ 05:38, 23 September 2008 (UTC)
 * I red once again carefully your initial posting. I hope that you will do the same with my answer, especially N 5. I quoted above - "NPOV says that the article should fairly represent all significant viewpoints that have been published by a reliable source, and should do so in proportion to the prominence of each". Do you want to count proportions in this article? The problem here is that we haven't clear criterion where exactly is a bоrder between fringe and significant minority's POVs.--JSimin (talk) 15:51, 23 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Well, you evidently have not understood my point then. Do you want me to repeat it for you, slowly and carefully, or are you just going to try harder once more? Fut.Perf. ☼ 17:53, 23 September 2008 (UTC)
 * I will be glad if we find a way to discuss arguments in essence. Our words aren’t Holy Writ, so we can explain, change them and even see the reasons in the arguments of the other side. :) Can we try to discuss argument by argument?--JSimin (talk) 13:03, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

Argument by argument

 * Okay, once more then. The issue is not so much on whether the difference of opinions involves serious "minority" opinions or mere "fringe opinions" (although, yes, "fringe" is what they are). The issue is that that difference of opinions does not really relate to the topic of this article. Let me try to explain it with an example. Let's suppose scholar A believes that apples are kinds of oranges. Scholar B believes that apples are kinds of pears. Now, in the article on apple we will of course note this disagreement. But on the article on Golden Delicious, a sub-type of apples? Of course, A might include Golden Delicious in his Handbook of Oranges, while B might have a chapter on them in his Great Compendium of Pears. But the facts they will report about them in each will be the same: they are yellow, they are soft, they are sweet. And they are apples. Scholars A and B are in perfect agreement about Golden Delicious. Their disagreement is about an order of hierarchy higher up. It is of no consequence for how Golden Delicous are to be described. Therefore, importing the pear-vs-orange dispute into every subarticle on types of apples will be unproductive.
 * Back to the real topic, Stoykov (the only author quoted that really counts as a realiable present-day voice suitable to back up a statement made in the present tense) predictably seems to have nothing substantially different to say about this particular dialect than Vidoeski. In fact, he uses Vidoeski as his own principal source throughout. Stoykov and Vidoeski do not disagree about the Prilep-Bitola dialect at all. Their disagreement is on an entirely different logical level, and in no way affects the description of this dialect. Fut.Perf. ☼ 07:47, 28 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Let see, first, the hypothetical example with Golden Delicious. As I understood you, there is a disagreement between scholars (A and B) about the hierarchical belonging of the apples. Notwithstanding that both scholars might include Golden Delicious in their books about the relevant topics (oranges or pears), there aren’t some disagreement about the classification of Golden Delicious – to the apples. It’s clear that we have to note a disagreement in the relevant article – that about apples. If there aren’t some assertions about the classification of the apples as a whole in the article Golden Delicious, there aren’t indispensability to enter into the biggest argue there. But what we have to do if there are claims about the classification of the apples in the article about one of their sub-types?
 * In the real situation scholar A believes that these group of dialects belongs to the dialects of Macedonain language, but scholar B believes that these dialects belongs to Bulgarian language. Unlike to Golden Delicious we have a disagreement in this level, yet. (The question of other articles is that there are more disagreements about some other levels of classification between the scholars). Therefore we have to note the disagreement here.
 * The differency between hypothetical example and real topic is:


 * 1) Golden Delicious-apple-oranges/pears*
 * 2) Prilep-Bitola dialects - Macedonian/Bulgarian diasystem - separate Macedonian language/form of Bulgarian language.  ( * the classification of the terms in Italic is disputable, in bold are indisputable)
 * You are right that there aren’t some disagreement about the main features of these dialects. The disagreement is about the classification. Therefore sources as Stoykov have significance to show the other POV about the classification.
 * P.S. You can see that Stoykov uses not only B. Vidoeski, but also Mirchev, Koneski, Koneska, Filiposki etc. Stoykov don’t make some new linguistical “discovery”, as it didn’t made Vidoeski (which name isn't mentioned in the article). In the time when Vidoeski made his main contributions in Macedonian dialectology, these dialects have been described in the science – mostly (but not only) as Bulgarian dialects. The big contribution made by Vidoeski is namely systematization. The raw materials about the dailects in this region were collected and published in the second half of XIX and the first half of XX c. – mostly by Bulgarians from Macedonia (Miladinov Brothers, Kuzman Shapkarev, Dimitar Mirchev etc). The basical linguistical description of these dialects was made in the first half of the XX century – by Bulgarian (Mircev, Mladenov, Miletich etc), but also by French (A. Mazon), Russian and by scientists from other nationalities.--JSimin (talk) 14:10, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

The difference between this case and my analogy you pick up is a superficial one. Okay, let's change the analogy to make it closer: A believes apples are just special kinds of pears; B believes apples are just apples. Still, the issue would not be part of the article on some sub-type of apple. Back to the dialects, we would have a legitimate issue if there was a difference of opinions of the type: A thinks that all dialects that have property x are MK, all others are BG; B thinks that the crucial criterion is property y; now this dialect has property x but not y, so A will classify it as MK but B will classify it as BG. That would be a substantial difference of opinion about this dialect. That's the kind of situation you'd presumably get with some of the intermediate dialects further east. But not with this one. Whatever differences of opinion there are, they are not differences of opinion about this dialect itself, but differences of opinion about Macedonian as a whole, and the consequences of these differences for the description of the dialect itself are utterly trivial. Fut.Perf. ☼ 06:08, 30 September 2008 (UTC)


 * The analogy: I am agree that if A believes apples are just special kinds of pears and B believes apples are just apples, the issue would not be a part of the article on some sub-type of apple. In your example we have something very clear and solid – apples. Both of them are agree that Golden Delicious are sub-type of apples.
 * In our case both of them are agree that Prilep-Bitola dialect is a (Slavic) dialect (group of dialects). This is a clear and solid analogy to apple in the hypothetical example. But neither A is agree that the dialect is Bulgarian, neither B is agree that the dialects are Macedonian. If the initial definition in the article is: “The Prilep-Bitola dialect is a (Slavic) dialect, spoken in Macedonia... (without specification about the language) (= "Golden Delicious is a sup-type of apples"), the analogy would be perfect.
 * A superficial consideration: If “B thinks that the crucial criterion is property y” (not x, as A) and unlike A classify the dialects as Bulgarian, obviously B believes that they have property y.
 * A substantial consideration: The fact that some scholars have disagreements about Macedonian (literary form + dialects...) as a whole, don’t change or belittle the other fact – that they have also disagreements about the classification of one of the its/Bulgarian dialects. This is a first level of disagreement and we can neglect it only we decide to write "apple" :), i.e. dialect/Slavic dialect.--JSimin (talk) 17:26, 1 October 2008 (UTC)


 * An offer: I am thinking about other variant: “According to scientists who consider Macedonian language Bulgarian, Prilep-Bitola dialects are Bulgarian...” Thus we can note the bigger argue and simultaneously to notice the fact that there are disagreements in this level yet, among some linguists who paid attention to this dialect. What do you think?--JSimin (talk) 17:46, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
 * "According to people who consider apples as pears, Golden Delicious apples are pears." Your new suggestion only exposes more clearly how ridiculously redundant that whole statement has been from the beginning. No way. Fut.Perf. ☼ 20:49, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Here I found a problem: you are using very forcible appraisement without explanations. I wrote so many considerations and one additional proposal, but you just decide to answer only to proposal with “ridiculously redundant…” etc. Since you wrote “According to people who consider apples as pears, Golden Delicious apples are pears”, obviously you didn’t enter in my arguments above and didn’t understand the differences between your analogy and real article. What can I do? To explain once again with other words this difference? And what is guarantee that you’ll try to understand/refute/aprove them?
 * Phrases as “no way” don’t show real desire to discuss honestly with arguments the situation. Anyway, I don’t insist on my offer. It was unsuccessful attempt to start to look at some compromise. I prefer the initial variant which afford an clear opportunity to the readers to understand that there are other interpretation about the classification of these dialects.--JSimin (talk) 14:12, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

Another analogy
Since the apple-pears analogies are lost on certain people, here's another comparison, this time a real-life one. The Scots language is regarded, by many people and many scholars, as a form of English; by others it is regarded as a separate language. Now, we have a few articles about sub-varieties of Scots, for instance Doric dialect (Scotland).

Does this article have a disclaimer to the effect that "Authors who regard Scots as a form of English also regard Doric as a form of English"? No, of course not. It would be true, but it would be ridiculously trivial. The article on Doric rightly classifies Doric as a form of Scots, and leaves the issue of what Scots is to the articles where that is relevant.

(Incidentally, the view that sees Scots as essentially a group of English dialects is much stronger in the relevant academic literature than the view that subsumes Macedonian under Bulgarian.) Fut.Perf. ☼ 20:26, 12 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Let's make this new analogy clearer. I am sure that you can proceed and point concrete authors (linguists) who regarded this particular Scotish dialect as English.--AKeckarov (talk) 14:34, 20 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Sure. For instance, there's a whole slew of articles written recently about Buckie "English" by J. Smith and various coauthors. Which is a form of the local ("Doric") Scots. The same authors use "Buckie Scots" interchangeably in other articles. Fut.Perf. ☼ 14:54, 20 October 2008 (UTC)


 * I hope that you'll point these articles more precisly. I want to try to find them and to verify the analogy. Thanks, in advance.--AKeckarov (talk) 15:31, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

Oh, but very gladly. Just a random two (about two different subvarieties of Scots) Fut.Perf. ☼ 17:01, 20 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Smith/Tagliamonte, "'We were all thegither... I think we was all thegither': was regularization in Buckie English", World Englishes 17 (2003); speaks of the local speech, "known as the Doric or Buchan Scots, but for these purposes will be referred to as Buckie English."
 * Kortmann/Szmercsanyi, "The morphosyntax of varieties of English worldwide": "the English spoken in Orkney and Shetland [...] (technically, a variety of Scots"

Outside opinion, by request
Having read the entire talk page, I agree with those stating this is a fringe view and not necessary for this article. I'm going to request a few more eyes come look over this and give an opinion. This long, slow edit war is silly. Time to end it. لenna vecia  20:55, 13 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Since I'm not into this discussion for some time now cause of the levels of sarcasm and incivility in the talkpage (and since I'm not a linguist by FPAS'es own words and therefore I'm not competent on the issue) I'll just post what sources I used elsewhere to justify the fringe view:


 * Mazon, Andre. Contes Slaves de la Macédoine Sud-Occidentale: Etude linguistique; textes et traduction; Notes de Folklore, Paris 1923, p. 4.
 * Селищев, Афанасий. Избранные труды, Москва 1968.
 * Die Slaven in Griechenland von Max Vasmer. Verlag der Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin 1941. Kap. VI: Allgemeines und sprachliche Stellung der Slaven Griechenlands.
 * K. Sandfeld, Balkanfilologien (København, 1926, MCMXXVI).
 * Konstantin Josef Jireček, Die Balkanvölker und ihre kulturellen und politischen Bestrebungen, Urania, II, Jg. 13, 27. März 1909, p. 195.
 * Stefan Verković, Описание быта македонских болгар; Топографическо-этнографический очерк Македонии (Петербург, 1889).
 * Having posted this, I withdraw from the talkpage again. -- L a v e o l  T 21:40, 13 October 2008 (UTC)


 * ... without of course any indication how you think this randomly cut-and-pasted collection of refs is in any way relevant to the issue. One of them deals with the etymology of medieval placenames in Greece, for crying out loud. The others are, with one exception, from a time when the question under discussion here was not even yet known as an issue to most scholarship. You've given no sign here that you've even understood what we were discussing. Fut.Perf. ☼ 06:10, 14 October 2008 (UTC)


 * I know I don't have the vote here. For some reason you're too angry with this issue to allow anyone else to have a say.-- L a v e o l  T 07:15, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Another outside view
If an average person from Bulgaria and an average person from the (FY) Republic of Macedonia meet, they can understand each other. That's a good reason for thinking that they speak the same language (Bulgarian), but this is not necessarily true. (Otherwise Spanish would be the same language as Catalan, Catalan the same language as Occitan, Occitan the same language as French. Therefore Spanish and French would be the same language. – I may be wrong in the details, but you should see the problem I want to point out.)

Whether two dialects belong to the same language depends not just on their intrinsic properties such as grammar and vocabulary. Some other factors:
 * Do speakers of both dialects normally use the same written language, i.e. the same alphabet, the same orthography, the same vocabulary?
 * Do speakers of both dialects generally belong to the same ethnic group?
 * Are there any other languages that are a better match for one of the dialects than for the other? (E.g. even though Catalan and Occitan are extremely similar, someone who insists on grouping them as dialects of some national language would regard Catalan as a Spanish dialect and Occitan as a French dialect. This view probably exists as a fringe view.)
 * What do the speakers of both dialects generally think about the matter? What do they want to be the case? What do legal texts, e.g. constitutions, say about the matter?

It seems that taking all such factors in account, the modern standard view is that the group of dialects known as Macedonian is a language in its own right rather than a group of dialects of Bulgarian. (Macedonian has its own alphabet and written form of the language, which are however mutually intelligible with the Bulgarian alphabet and written form of the language. Macedonians and Bulgarians don't agree about the classification – not too surprisingly, Bulgarians tend to think Macedonian dialects are Bulgarian dialects, while Macedonians disagree.) Other views are discussed briefly in Macedonian language, and extensively in Political views on the Macedonian language.

In this situation I think the right thing to do is to say that the Prilep-Bitola dialect is a dialect of Macedonian. It goes without saying that this means it's a dialect of Bulgarian if you think Macedonian is a subset of Bulgarian. The view that Macedonian is not a language in its own right is presumably related to views that there is no Macedonian nation separate from the Bulgarian nation (hence presumably no need for a Macedonian state).

The situation is different with the Maleševo-Pirin dialect, which is spoken near the border with Bulgaria, and in fact also in Bulgaria near the border with Macedonia. This dialect is often considered as a dialect of Macedonian, but also specifically and individually as a dialect of Bulgarian, or as something in between. I think some of the confusion here happened because some editors here do not speak English very well, and are no scientists. So they did not understand that this is what Future Perfect meant when he said "specifically and individually".

Mentioning the dispute in this article, however, would be similar to writing (assuming that many Bulgarians want to annex Macedonia, which I hope is not true – so it's only for illustration): "Skopje is a city in the Republic of Macedonia. Many Bulgarians think that, along with the rest of Macedonia, it should be part of Bulgaria." --Hans Adler (talk) 11:21, 16 October 2008 (UTC)


 * I think that the political connection with Macedonian nation and some "anexation" isn't necesary here. The question about Macedonian nation, about the meaning of the term "nation" (political nation, traditional Eastern Europian, including in RoM' meaning of the cultural nation etc) isn't a question from the field of dialectology. There are two separate linguistic group of articles - one about the Macedonian language as a whole and the other about the dialects in the region of Macedonia. There are some dasagreemnets about the clasification in both cases. I think the right thing to do is to avoid politization in the talk page and to note the situation in the field in the dialectology in the article.
 * P.S. Hans Adler, I'll add one think with plitical connotation - when you wrote about disagreements between Macedonians and Bulgarians, maybe you meant citizens of Republic of Nacedonia and citizens of Bulgaria. I am Macedonian too, from this kind of Macedonians who are agree with Bulgarian linguists. :). As many citizens of Republic of Macedonia and Bulgaria, I am for independant Republic of Macedonia and I hope that there'll come times when there'll be conditions to discuuss our culture, past and present without frustrations.--AKeckarov (talk) 15:12, 20 October 2008 (UTC)
 * I think you missed my point. The term "language" is not apolitical. It cannot be apolitical. We are discussing a borderline case here: We have mutual intelligibility, and this suggests one language. We have (somewhat) different written forms, even (slightly) different alphabets, and this suggests two languages. In such a situation we need additional criteria that are inevitably political. This means that if the political situation changes, the linguistic classification may change as a result.
 * Take Danish, for example. It used to be one language, and it had Norwegian and Swedish dialects spoken in Norway and Sweden. When Norway and Sweden became independent, Danish split into Norwegian and Swedish. From the scientific sources that have been presented so far, it seems that something similar has happened with Bulgarian and Macedonian.
 * There seems to be a different situation with Luxembourgish, which (according to Wikipedia) is both a dialect of German (it certainly sounds like one to me), and a national language (of Luxembourg). I think the reason it is classified as a dialect is that newspapers in Luxembourg are normally written in German (or French), not in Luxembourgish. I think that's a good test: Do the local newspapers in the Republic of Macedonia, or in the area where the Prilep-Bitola dialect is spoken, generally use standard Bulgarian, or do they use standard Macedonian?
 * Future Perfect holds that internationally, the view that Macedonian is still a subset of Bulgarian is a fringe view, held only by Bulgarian and perhaps some other Slavic experts. I am not an expert (Future Perfect is), so I must go by the sources presented here. And it seems to be the case that all the recent sources that contradict Future Perfect are from Bulgaria or perhaps Russia, while Future Perfect has recent international sources for his position.
 * In this situation it seems perfectly appropriate that this article does not mention the theory that Macedonian is a dialect of Bulgarian. The situation with articles in Slavic versions of Wikipedia (especially the Bulgarian version) may be completely different though. (For these the position is probably not a fringe position; editors there might even decide it's the consensus of the most relevant (for them) scholars. But that's just a speculation.)
 * The question whether Macedonian is a group of Bulgarian dialects is a political question. The question whether we mention the dispute in this article is apparently not a political question because it is dictated by the reliable sources. It is a question of policy. You can convince me otherwise if you find recent (post-Yugoslavia) reliable sources that contradict Future Perfect's sources, that are of a comparable quality, and that are sufficiently far removed from any local political disputes (basically that means non-Slavic sources).
 * In a sense that's a kind of bias that values English experts more than Bulgarian experts. (In the Bulgarian version of the article it will be the other way round, of course.) If you don't agree with that, I think there is a WikiProject that tries to figure out how to deal with such systemic biases, and you might want to ask for their opinion. --Hans Adler (talk) 17:42, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

It's a little more clear-cut than that. Only the name of the language is political (being named after the ethnic group for which it is native), as the Macedonian diasystem extends into other countries: Albania, Greece and Bulgaria. --203.206.87.53 (talk) 03:16, 12 June 2011 (UTC)